A CRITICAL STUDY OF NEWS DISCOURSE: IRAN’S TENTH PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION OF 2009 (1388) IN KEYHAN AND ETEMAD NEWSPAPERS

The present study investigated the use of language for the representation of conflicting ideological positions of two main discourses Eslahtalaban, “the Reformists”, and Osulgarayan, “the Principlists”, in Keyhan and Etemad Iranian newspapers. To this purpose, 86 headlines (43 headlines from Etemad and 43 headlines from Keyhan newspapers) were selected from 4th April 2009 to 13th June 2009 and analyzed based on Holliday and Mathieson’s transitivity (2004) model. The research findings revealed that Keyhan newspaper’s coverage of Iranian Tenth Presidential Election tended to highlight semantic roles and processes of Principlists discourse while Etemad newspaper had a tendency to foreground semantic roles and processes of reformists discourse. In other words, critical text analyses showed that choices of the processes and participants enabled writers to manipulate the realizations of agency and power in the representation of action to produce particular meanings which were not always explicit for all readers. The research results also provided evidence to support the claim that news media did not simply reflect the social reality but made dominant ideologies in representing political events as well.